Why most diets FAIL

If you’re struggling to lose weight, yet have seemingly tried every diet in the world, this article will help you to understand why most diets fail. And what you can do about it.

Let’s begin by establishing the purpose of any diet… Creating a calorie deficit. If you eat less calories than you burn, you’ll lose weight. That’s called a deficit. Simple, right?

The problem is in the way most diets create this deficit. This problem is restriction. When a diet is overly restrictive, it eventually becomes unsustainable.

---

---

---

Here are a few examples of common diets out there and how they create restrictions:

Diet name	Key features
Atkins	Carbohydrate “Carb” restriction
Paleo	No grains (bye, bye bread), no dairy (bye, bye milkshakes and ice cream), no sugar, no processed foods (bye, bye naughty treats).
Ketogenic “Keto”	Carb restriction
The Zone diet	Extreme calorie restriction.
The Cabbage soup Diet	Restricting everything, other than cabbage!
Intermittent Fasting (IF)	Time restriction.
Low Fat Diets	Fat restriction, duh!
One Meal a Day	Time restriction.

As you can see from the samples above, they all do essentially the same thing…They restrict certain food groups. If you cut out or severely limit a certain food group, such as Carbohydrates (carbs), then you will create a calorie deficit.

But how long will you be able to sustain not being allowed to eat carbs? You’ll spend every single day reading food labels to ensure they don’t contain any carbs. You’ll never be able to enjoy bread, grains, cereal, pizza, wraps, doughnuts, sweets, chocolate etc. For the vast majority of people, this will end in failure!

Here are the restrictions that most diets create and why they can be problematic:

Carbohydrate restriction

Carbohydrates (carbs) are your body’s primary source of energy. Healthy sources of carbs provide your body with the fuel it needs to exercise with intensity. They also provide essential minerals and nutrients necessary for optimum health. Oh, and your brain uses it, too!

Certain diets, such as the Ketogenic (Keto) Diet, all but completely eliminate Carbohydrates. To strictly adhere to the ketogenic diet, you will be ingesting less than 35 grams of carbs per day. If you wish to participate in any form of high intensity exercise, such as HIIT, spinning, boxing, circuit training etc, this restriction will have a noticeable effect on your ability to work hard. If you feel “flat” and lacking energy when you exercise, you’ll burn less calories than if you were fuelled correctly.

Yes, your body can adapt to very low carbs and can even break down fat for fuel by a process known as Gluconeogenesis. In this way, your body creates Glucose (sugars) to provide you with fuel but it is a complex process and isn’t particularly pleasant for active people. Just look at a marathon runner, when they “hit the wall”. This is when their stored carbohydrates in the liver and muscles (glycogen) runs out and their body has to turn to fat for fuel.

Fat restriction

Low-fat diets have been a regular staples since the late 1970s and yet obesity has sky-rocketed since that time. In creating low-fat products, manufacturers realised that when you take out the fat, you lose most of the taste. What could be done to improve the taste? They add in more sugars salt and other refined ingredients to make them palatable again. Quite often, the low-fat version of the same “full-fat” version, has around the same number of calories.

Fats have essential roles for our health:

• Energy source – Our body uses the fat we eat, and fats we make from other nutrients in our bodies,  to provide the energy for most of our life-functions.
• Essential fatty acids – Dietary fats that are essential for growth development and cell functions, but cannot be made by our body’s processes.
• Energy storage – The extra calories that we consume, but do not need to use immediately, are stored for future use in special fat cells (adipose tissue) Our human race wouldn’t have made it this far if we couldn’t store fat on our body for times of limited food.
• Maintaining healthy skin and other tissues – All of our body’s cells need to contain some fats as essential parts of cell membranes, controlling what goes in and out of our cells.
• Proper functioning of nerves and brain– fats are part of myelin– a fatty material which wraps around our nerve cells so that they can send electrical messages. Our brains contain large amounts of essential fats.
• Transporting fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K through the bloodstream to where they are needed – These vitamins play a vital role in everything from our eyesight, to immune function, bone density and healthy blood.
• Healthy hormones – Needed to regulate many bodily processes, including menstruation and testosterone levels.

So, by cutting out such an important macronutrient as fat, it can affect your body’s vital functions. We don’t want that!

Calorie restriction

At the start of this article we established that if you eat less calories than you burn, you’ll lose weight. Calories in, calories out. Let me quickly explain the numbers for you.

There are approximately 3,500 calories in 1lb of stored body fat. So in order to lose a single pound (lb) of fat, you’d need to create a deficit of 3,500 calories per week. To put that another way, you’ll need to maintain a deficit of 500 calories per day.

Mathematically put; 3500 calories ÷ 7 days per week = 500 calorie deficit per day.

Therefore, if you were currently eating 2,000 calories per day, you’d need reduce to 1,500 calories per day, to lose a pound per week. Want to lose more? 2lbs per week? Well now you’d need to eat 1,000 calories per day in this example.

Do you start to see where the problem is? 1,000 calories per day is very low! And eventually, as your weight loss slows down…then what? Eat 500 calories a day? Soon you will end up depriving yourself of essential vitamins and minerals. You will feel permanently weak, tired and lethargic. If you’re a female, more than likely you’ll eventually suffer from Amenorrhea – your periods will stop. You’ll also put yourself at increased risk of Osteoporosis and a host of other diseases (including death), and you will lose muscle mass. And just as bad…you’ll be permanently hungry!

Time restriction

Certain “diets” are more a strategy for when you eat, rather than what you eat. For example, a popular method is known as Intermittent Fasting, or IF for short. When you follow the IF method, you have a specific “eating window”, where you eat and for the rest of the time, you fast – In other words, you don’t consume anything other than water or black tea/coffee. Here’s what it looks like.

16 hours – Fast. 8 hours – Eat. For example- Between 12pm – 8pm you can eat, then the rest of the time, you fast. If you tend to skip Breakfast, then you’ve probably followed the IF method without even realising it.

The problem with this method for some people is that when you don’t eat for prolonged periods of time, your blood sugar can drop and this increases your hunger. If you don’t tolerate hunger very well, you can make poor food choices and either overeat at meal time or eat fatty, sugary foods in order to get your blood sugar back up.

Some methods, such as One meal per day (OMAD), allow only one meal in a 24 hour period. The idea is that you’re unlikely to be able to eat your entire daily calories in one sitting. The problem with this is getting all of your micronutrients (vitamins, minerals etc), macronutrients (protein, carbs and fats) and calories in one meal is going to require a huge volume of food. This will leave you feeling uncomfortably full and place a heavy load on your digestive system.

So what’s the best diet?

If you’ve stuck with me until this point, I think it’s only fair that I give you some solutions that not only work but are most importantly sustainable. The best diet is the diet you can follow for your whole life.

Here are some simple tips you can follow to not fall into the fad-diet trap ever again:

• Make a food diary – Write down everything you eat and drink for a whole week – Including garnishes, sauces, condiments etc.
• Look through your diary and find anything that provides calories but no significant nutrition (sweets, junk foods, high-calorie condiments, alcohol etc)
• Decide whether you can replace those junk items with healthier, lower-calorie versions (eg diet coke, instead or regular), or cut them out entirely for a while.
• Make substitutions – Replacing rice with cauliflower rice for one meal could save around 300 calories, and provide you with extra vitamins and minerals.
• Choose whole foods – A portion of protein, vegetables and a healthy carbohydrate with each meal.
• Learn to meal-prep – It’s so much easier to eat well when you’ve made healthy food in bulk and it’s already in the fridge ready to heat up.
• Choose foods for their nutrition, not just for their taste – You can improve the flavour of most foods by getting creative with herbs and spices!
• Use the portion method – Reducing your serving sizes is a simple way to reduce your calorie intake.
• Reduce your calories slowly. Start by cutting back by 300-500 calories, then monitor your weight/measurements and also your energy levels. Replacing a regular fizzy drink with a sugar-free version and swapping a bag of crisps for an apple could be enough to start with.
• Exercise daily – The current recommendations are 150 minutes of exercise per week. It doesn’t have to super intense. A daily walk will help to burn calories and improve your health enormously – Invite a friend and you’ll have fun while helping them keep fit, too.
• Drink enough water – Water is vital for your body. It also helps to fill your stomach, reducing hunger pangs and allowing you to make smarter food choices.

And finally…Don’t drink your calories! Choose calorie-free drinks, or even better, water. This will save you precious calories that you can get from real food. That way, you’ll feel fuller as you’ll be able to eat more.

Think about this for a moment; If you drank a 330ml can of regular Coca-Cola every day, that would add up to 355,145 calories in a year!

355,145 ÷ 3,500 calories in 1lb of fat equals a whopping 101 pounds. In metric that’s 45.8kg. And in old-skool weight measure it’s 7.2 stone!

Losing weight shouldn’t be a daily struggle and it shouldn’t be complicated.

Often though, it’s our mindset that determines our ability to make the right choices. If you’ve decided that you need some extra help to make the next step, I’m here to help. We can use hypnosis for weight loss. By using hypnosis, we can help you to let get of limiting beliefs and improve your motivation to make better choices. Hypnosis also massively reduces your stress levels, which in turn has a positive effect on your levels of hunger and satiety. You can call me on +44 (0)7949 552 824 or drop me an email.